


Moonbright

by wearwind



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age II
Genre: Aftermath, Comfort Reading, Comfort Sex, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Fenris worries, Hawke answers, Kinda, Literal Sleeping Together, One Shot, Tenderness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-21
Updated: 2019-05-21
Packaged: 2020-03-09 04:50:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,246
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18909907
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wearwind/pseuds/wearwind
Summary: He's scared. She's there.Kinda-sorta epilogue toTomorrow, but will work just fine for any Fenhawke.





	Moonbright

**Author's Note:**

  * For [G.](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=G.).



> I've nothing to add, honestly. Blame my partner, and the undeniable fact that I seem to be processing most of the complexities of my emotional life through the funfair mirror of those two.
> 
> Ah, and Jovanotti.
> 
> (For those that haven't read [Tomorrow](https://archiveofourown.org/works/8641366/chapters/19817416): Hawke got that scar from her Arishok duel, and it very nearly killed her.)

Stirring out of a restless dream, he opens his eyes and he dreams again.

There’s – this isn’t reality. This is a mirage, a trick of blood magic, pushed into his scarred head by another cruel magister. It cannot be. Night after night, one broken-up fever dream after another, he opens his eyes to a silent bedroom, stars gleaming brilliant and distant through the stained glass; and against him, against _him,_ there’s a body tangled in the white and red sheets. A black braid, messy and ever on the verge of falling apart, resting on the pillow like a black river spilling out into a still and serene lake of her forehead. A line of her shoulders, pale and gleaming in the starlight. Her back, and the horrifying, ugly scar across it; a gigantic tear lining it shoulder to hip, red and uneven, the edges of smooth flesh melting into a leathery invasion dividing her body in half. It should have killed her. Maybe it had, and ever since then, he’d lost his mind, or given it to a desire demon without a second thought, and imagined – this –

His fingertips hover across the scar, hesitant and unsure, and he withdraws without touching. If this is a dream, it will kill him. His heart is too swollen with grief, with hope, with love, with want. Ever since he first saw her, he had gone against his every instinct – to fight, to flee, to _not let himself feel –_ but this is too much. This is the one loss he will not live to forget.

Against the heart that thrashes wildly against the cage of his breast, he bows before her, freezing still with his lips a fraction of an inch away from the scarred, melted flesh. Fear paralyzes his muscles into stone. If he finally touches her, and she will be smoke under his lips –

He’s trapped in a nightmare of his own making, and his answer is a hair’s breadth away, but he doesn’t dare take it for a long time.

And then she sighs, shifting in her sleep, and her skin brushes against his lips, and _it doesn’t melt away._

He exhales, unaware of his own shivering.

She’s alive.

She’s alive.

She’s _alive._

He presses his lips to the base of her spine. Then again, an inch higher, making his way up the column of her body, tasting the smoothness and salt on her skin; this is a road he has taken so many times. He knows the twists and turns of it, and yet every single traverse feels like a discovery. A new landscape – an unconscious shiver she gives, a breath let out with a barely audible sound – and a new road, marred by the shocking mountain range of the scar across her spine. But always, always the same destination.

Home.

She turns her head languidly as he kisses the nape of her neck, eyes still sealed with sleep. “Fenris,” she whispers, an echo of laughter in her sleep-heavy voice, “What time is it?”

“Early,” he murmurs, lips brushing across the arch of her ear. She stirs, turning towards him; a small crease forms on her smooth forehead, and he leans in and kisses it smooth. Her arms twist in the sheets to untangle themselves from the fabric and reach for his face blindly, her thumbs coming to rest on the curls of lyrium.

“Can’t sleep?”

He doesn’t answer. Instead, he continues his journey across the lines of her jaw, her cheekbones, her nose; she arches her head back, the braid pushed back into the pillow, her mouth parted in her blind search for him. Her eyelashes flutter delicately, but do not part; her cheeks are rosy, her lips a bare, pale pink. Not a single piece of  fabric divides their bodies: her pale white and his ashen-grey.

She has chosen this.

She has chosen _him._

There were women in Tevinter, once. Unremarkable women, but he looked at them as he looked at everything: ever cautious, as he could not afford not to be. He watched and observed how they cultivated their airs, how they put on the fashionable Orlesian masks; how their mouths were rubbed with carmine and their eyelids heavy with colourful dust. How they made themselves blemishless, and took on names they had not earned. _Queen, Princess, Empress._ They were shadows of a masquerade, coming alive only for the thrill of the ballroom, existing only to reflect in the eye of the onlooker.

None of them could ever compare to Hawke’s stark and wonderful nakedness.

And he could imagine that so well, those early memories: a spinning ballroom, dancing shadows. That life reached here too, in every world in every country; but she is real. She is nude, unhiding, reaching out to be known; and he would know her. He _knows_ her.

He presses a kiss to her mouth, feels the way she melts into it, a soft inward sigh as she pulls him closer by the edges of his jaw.

“I love you,” he whispers, throaty and clumsy, and the world somehow doesn’t collapse on his head. The illusion doesn’t break. The most audacious dare of his life, and it continues, it allows him to keep her night after restless night. It doesn’t backfire. It doesn’t hurt him.

Or –

“I love you too,” she murmurs, without hesitation, reflexively like a breath, and he thinks that it might hurt him after all.

His heart was never meant for this. _He_ was never meant for this. He’s meant for breaking, and destroying, and tearing apart, and unleashing and yanking back, and for being _had,_ not for having –

“Fenris,” she whispers, her nose nudging his, her eyes fluttering open at last, shining and brilliant blue. He leans his forehead against the crook of her neck, his body arched over hers, kneeling like a man begging for his life; he is. He’s just a scrap of torn flesh, bound together by a knot of lyrium and disjointed memories, and he cannot look her in the eye. Cannot see the truth of himself reflected in that defiant cerulean mirror. Cannot – will not –

Her hands find their way to his shoulder blades, skimming across the scarred flesh and leaving a tingle of residual magic in their wake; then they pull him in in one sharp tug. He collapses into the warmth of her, the overwhelming smell of skin and cheap soap and something else so undeniably _Hawke,_ and he feels her entire body shift to accommodate him; her legs tangle around his, her feet hook around his calves, her chin falls to rest on the edge his shoulder as he breathes her in. Her hands soothe around his shoulders gently, pressing down to drain the tension; then they wander up across the nape of his neck to cradle the back of his head.

It’s a simple rhythm. Her ribcage expands under his with every inhale; he exhales, making space, and breathes in the air of her lips swishing gently in his ears as she lets go of her own breath. And then – again. And again, and again, until he comes back to his senses and slowly works up the resolve to believe her again.

She _loves_ him.   

She loves him reflexively, without second thought. She loves him like a freewoman does, and no-one is freer than her. And he wants it so desperately it scares him witless; this kind of want is a slave’s demise, the ultimate power to wield over him. A slave – a surviving slave – does – not – _want._

He wants her.

Almost against his will, he sinks his teeth into her shoulder; a small, disgusting part of him keens in delight at her flinch. He lets go immediately, pulling away, but she doesn’t let him; her hands push him down, the entwined limbs becoming a living trap. He flails for a second, forgetting where he is, and silver lyrium light illuminates the room brighter than the rising moon –

She bites him back, and his world refocuses against that sharp sting.

“Fenris,” she says, louder, insisting. He turns his head away in shame, but her hands nudge his jaw back to face her; not a push, this time, but a gentler coaxing. She strokes his back slowly, along the length of his spine, in a quiet mimicry of his mouth’s earlier wandering, and he clenches his eyes shut to contain the emotions gripping him like a sudden blood magic spell. Because there’s blood on his teeth, he can taste and smell it; he’s bitten her too hard.

He’s been cursed. _This_ is a curse, bloody damnation. To want something so much only to hurt it –

But Hawke’s voice is steady when she asks, “Do you know where you are?” He nods a shaky assent. “Where are we, Fenris?”

“Kirkwall.” _Your city._ “Your mansion. Bedroom.”

She presses a kiss to his temple, and more blood oozes out of the teeth-shaped wound on the side of her neck. “Thank the Maker,” she murmurs. “Small mercies. What’s in your head, now?”

 _I’m scared,_ he thinks. _Because I want you so much you could break me with a word. Because if this is a trick, an illusion, and you died in the Qunari invasion, or you were never real, then I will tear out my own heart and welcome death as relief. Because I walked away from you once, and your eyes have haunted me ever since. Because there isn’t a thing of beauty in this world that doesn’t remind me of you, because your body is the only thing I want to explore, because the way you throw back your hair means that you have never worn an iron collar on your neck. I don’t want to waste time, Hawke. I don’t know how much we have left, but I want you enough to risk that hell of loss. And it terrifies me. Does it terrify you?_

“I love you,” he repeats instead, lamely, and Hawke’s eyes flicker with understanding anyway.

She stalls with the answer, this time, covering his face with soft kisses; her breath tickles his skin, each inhale and exhale punctuated by a slow press of lips across his brow. He closes his eyes against it, like a man staring straight at the sun. This is the same light, same intensity; he cannot look at her when she kisses him.

“I’m scared all the time,” she whispers, lips briefly closing on the lobe of his ear, and he lets out an imperceptible sigh. “I am. This kind of—” she kisses him again, and for a moment he can’t form a coherent thought, too preoccupied with the way his body reacts to hers, “—intimacy, body and soul, that’s scary. _You’re_ scary. If I ever end up hurting you…”

Her voice falters, and he could laugh from this painful irony. He presses his palm to her neck, covering the bite he’s left there with the inside of his palm. “I—”

She covers his hands with hers. “Don’t,” she says softly. “Please don’t. Don’t apologise. _Please._ ”

The words freeze on his tongue, and she takes advantage of it and kisses him senselessly. He reaches for her blindly, not sure what he’s searching for, simply wanting _more –_ and she pushes him to the side, then on his back, straddling his stomach and leaning down to graze her teeth across his earlobe. A quiet groan ripples from his throat, one he feels more than lets out; and he presses her closer, almost mad with desire and something greater, something puffing out his heart like a funfair balloon, ridiculous and painful at the same time: a love he was never meant for. A love that has bound him tighter than any servitude ever could.

A love he would die for. A love he would spend his every waking hour _living_ for.

“I’m yours,” he whispers, staring up at her, open and vulnerable, and her expression over him shifts into pure heartbreak.

“You’re your own.”

“And I choose to be yours.”

Hawke shivers over him. “Okay,” she breathes, and leans down, her breasts brushing across his chest as she pulls him into a kiss. Then, before he has a chance to reciprocate, she says, “I’m yours too.”

And that –

The world shifts, just a little bit, and he realises that there had been an empty space somewhere behind his heart, waiting to be filled. A vacuum in the shape of those exact words. Like a key turned in a rusty keyhole, something unlocks in his chest. Something opens.

Something of – himself.

He shivers, clenching his arms around her, and they press close, skin to skin, nose to nose, her feet hooking against his calves. He has her. And she’s real, physical, a solid shape in between his arms, a flickering aura licking his lyrium. She is alive. And she is –

She is his, just as surely as he is hers.

 _This is not a chain,_ he thinks, watching her arms come up to embrace him through his suddenly blurry vision. _It’s not a shackle. It’s not possession._

It’s a kind of knot he has never known, but it binds them both.

Hawke nods, bright and triumphant, and leans back into him. “Silly man,” she murmurs in between kisses. “Always been yours. All of me. You only ever needed to reach out.”

And so –

He does.

It’s a long time before they finally fall back asleep, but when they do, he has no more nightmares.

**Author's Note:**

>  _Emozioni forti come il primo giorno_  
>  Che fanno sparire le cose che ho intorno  
> Cercherò il tuo sguardo nei posti affollati  
> La tua libertà oltre i fili spinati
> 
>  
> 
> _Non potrai capire mai cosa scateni_  
>  Quando mi apri la finestra dei tuoi seni  
> Quel comandamento scritto sui cuscini  
> Gli innamorati restan sempre ragazzini
> 
>  
> 
> _Io non lo so dove vanno a finire le ore_  
>  Quando ci scorrono addosso e se ne vanno via  
> Il tempo lava ferite che non può guarire  
> L'amore è senza rete e senza anestesia
> 
>  
> 
> _C'è un calendario sul muro della mia officina_  
>  Per ogni mese una foto futura di te  
> Che sei ogni giorno più erotica, o mia regina  
> Non c'è un secondo da perdere
> 
>  
> 
> _Impazzisco baciando la pelle della tua schiena_  
>  Quella strada che porta fino alla bocca tua  
> Non esiste esperienza più mistica e più terrena  
> Di ballare abbracciato con te
> 
>  
> 
> _al chiaro di luna_
> 
>  
> 
> __
> 
> Warsaw 2019.


End file.
